So I'm in the process of reading The Soft Machine, by Burroughs now. I was wondering what people thought of the whole cut up experiments? Success? Failure?
Personally, I'm finding the books a bit disorienting, but in kind of a good, fun, way.
I find them quite hard to get a grip on. I think they work well in shorter pieces such as poems or songs. As for novels, it almost seems like a gimmick that enevlopes the whole work.
Didn't Bowie get someone to write an program for his mac to take all the hard work out of cut up?
Hey if you don't like gimmicks in your novels then this might be one to A Void. Oddly enough the reviewer of this work utters almost the same phrase as buk about intial ideas of how such gimmicks are designed for shorter works...
I find *making* cut-ups is terrifc fun - mostly because I'm a really bad writer and sentences far cooler than any I'd ever come up with consciously start to emerge when I cut stuff up.
Reading them is a different matter though - probably fairly tedious unless they're the creations of a literary genius such as Burroughs.
quote:Originally posted by sleazenation: Hey if you don't like gimmicks in your novels then this might be one to A Void.I read that a couple of years ago; was surprised to find how well it read. It's only when one went looking for the "hook" of the missing E that it became problematic to one's reading.
